I do wish there was a way to check out early without endangering your insurance, though.
this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2025
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Just asking out of curiosity, but if that occurred, would that actually solve the problem of population decline?
To be clear I’m not advocating for this, I’m just trying to understand the what’s going on.
No. This would have lots of weird impacts. In the countryside, a lot of employees are quite old. A lot also do childcare for their grandkids at least some of the time. A lot of farmers would be gone as well. There's also a lot of paperwork that suddenly needs to be done grinding a lot of government to a halt. A lot of businesses as well since, from what I've seen form friends' older relatives dying, a lot of people do NOT have their shit in order and Japan has lots of small businesses and sole proprietorships.
Depending upon the wording of the policies and suicide, life insurance companies might have big issues or families might have huge monetary issues. I guess we can pretend they don't all die at once and clog up the whole morgue and funeral infrastructure which is a whole other thing.
The religious and political implications could be interesting. Bhuddist gravesites in Japan for family graves tend to be very expensive to buy and maintain.
I could actually keep going for a while, but the short version is that, at least in the short term, it would likely do more harm than good. This says nothing of the actual emotional impact on people.
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I think old people in the US should do this too. I actually think it would have a net positive impact.
Kind of sad death with dignity is not allowed in most places. I really dont want to be a walking corpse like my great grand parents were with Parkinson and/or alzheimers. Ill take hard drugs please. I get its hard to say goodbye to love ones but I saw them as already dead wasting away.
That did he write his thesis on, The Giver?
I was kinda hoping I'd read the article and it would be a modern day "a modest proposal" but it doesn't seem to be and now I'm sad.
Ubasute (elder senicide): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubasute
left there to die
Couldn't even do them the service of running them through with a katana. Just left them alone to suffer. Lol
Aha. Before committing mass suicide, they might want to use the next 75 years to invent robot caregivers. That'd be another option to deal with old people.
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I'm not confident that courting the suggestion of suicide by bringing public attention to it is the ethical move for a journalist.